The objective of this studio-based residency was to present an opportunity for 36 participants from 10 countries to consider the legacy and future of global conceptual art movements.

The title of the residency plays on the title of Gregory Battcock's 1973 anthology, "Idea Art", and intentionally recalls initial confusion as to just how to refer to a heterogeneous nexus of practices, primarily in Europe and America, that increasingly called into question traditional definitions associated with the idea of art. A consensus formed at first around the term 'concept art' (by the Fluxus artist Henry Flynt) and in the end, courtesy of Sol Lewitt, Conceptual art.

The timing of the exhibitions, and the residency, takes note of the degree to which Conceptual art, as a genre with a forty-year history, has underwritten a continuing struggle to constantly redefine art throughout a period of massive cultural transformation. Precisely for this reason, in reverting to the title "Idea Art", the residency suggests that there is a need to reconsider the ground that 'conceptualism' has dominated, and to re-address the essential hybridity of practices that preceded conceptualism and those that are emerging in the concerns of a new generation of practitioners working in a new millenium.